We may have shot a monkey into orbit and invented robots that milk cows, yet at no time in human history has a greater percentage of the world's population gone hungry. Fortunately, the explanation for this discrepancy is simple. The blame lies almost entirely on our meat-centered diet.

It's difficult to imagine a more fantastically inefficient way to produce food than raising livestock. Two thirds of US grain harvested each year is fed to farm animals, and, if we're lucky, a small percentage of that grain's nutrients is eventually returned in edible meat. Much of the invested protein and vitamins simply disappear, either absorbed by an animal's inedible skin, teeth, and bone, or excreted out its rear. Frances Moore Lappe, author of Diet for a Small Planet summarizes the problem as follows. "Our food system takes abundant grain, which hungry people can't afford, and shrinks it to meat, which better-off people will pay for."

World hunger is not, as most people assume, a problem of production, and therefore does not require a solution of technology. We need not urge